THE JOURNEY.

The next day, starting from Coblentz while the morning air was still pure and fresh, I bade adieu to the picturesque river behind me, and travelling on a capital macadamized road which cuts across the duchy of Nassau from Coblentz to Mainz, I immediately began to ascend the mountains, which on all sides were beautifully covered with wood. In about two hours, descending into a narrow valley, I passed through Bad-Ems, a small village, which, composed of hovels for its inhabitants, and, comparatively speaking, palaces for its guests, is pleasantly enough situated on the bank of a stream of water (the Lahn), imprisoned on every side by mountains which I should think very few of its visiters would be disposed to scale; and, from the little I saw of this place, I must own I felt but little disposition to remain in it. Its outline, though much admired, gives a cramped, contracted picture of the resources and amusements of the place, and as I drove through it (my postilion, with huge orange-coloured worsted tassels at his back, proudly playing a discordant voluntary on his horn), I particularly remarked some stiff, formal little walks, up and down which many well-dressed strangers were slowly promenading; but the truth is, that Ems is a regular, fashionable watering-place.

Many people, I fully admit, go there to drink the waters only because they are salutary, but a very great many more visit it from far different motives; and it is sad, as well as odd enough, that young ladies who are in a consumption, and old ladies who have a number of gaudy bonnets to display, find it equally desirable to come to Bad-Ems. This mixture of sickness and finery—this confusion between the hectic flush and red and white ribands—in short, this dance of death, is not the particular sort of folly I am fond of; and, though I wish to deprive no human being of his hobby-horse, yet I must repeat I was glad enough to leave dukes and duchesses, princes and ambassadors (whose carriages I saw standing in one single narrow street), to be cooped up together in the hot, expensive little valley of Ems,—an existence, to my humble taste, not altogether unlike that which the foul witch, Sycorax, inflicted upon Ariel, when, “in her most unmitigable rage,” she left him hitched in a cloven pine.

On leaving Ems, the road passing through the old mouldering town of Nassau, and under the beautiful ruins of the ducal Stamm-Schlosz in its neighbourhood, by a very steep acclivity, continues to ascend until it mounts at last into a sort of upper country, from various points of which are to be seen extensive views of the exalted duchy of Nassau, the features of which are on a very large scale.

No one, I think, can breathe this dry, fresh air for a single moment, or gaze for an instant on the peculiar colour of the sky, without both smelling and seeing that he is in a country very considerably above the level of the sea; yet this upper story, when it be once attained is by no means what can be termed a mountainous country. On the contrary, the province is composed either of flat table-land abruptly intersected by valleys, or rather of an undulation of hills and dales on an immense scale. In the great tract thus displayed to view, scarcely a habitation is to be seen, and for a considerable time I could not help wondering what had become of the people who had sown the crops (as far I could see they were in solitude waving around me), and who of course were somewhere or other lurking in ambush for the harvest: however, their humble abodes are almost all concealed in steep ravines, or water-courses, which in every direction intersect the whole of the region I have described. A bird’s-eye view would of course detect these little villages, but from any one point, as the eye roams over the surface, they are not to be seen. The duchy, which is completely unenclosed, for there is not even a fence to the orchards, appears like a royal park on a gigantic scale, about one-half being in corn-fields or uncultivated land, and the remainder in patches of woods and forests, which in shape and position resemble artificial plantations. The province, as far as one can see, thus seems to declare that it has but one lord and master, and the various views it presents are really very grand and imposing. A considerable portion of the wood grows among crags and rocks; and among the open land there is a great deal of what is evidently a mining country, with much indicating the existence of both iron and silver. The crops of wheat, oats, and barley, are rather light, yet they are very much better than one would expect from the ground from which they grow; but this is the effect of the extraordinary heavy dews which, during the whole summer, may be said, once in twenty-four hours, to irrigate the land.

The small steep ravines I have mentioned are the most romantic little spots that can well be conceived. The rugged sides of the hills which contain them are generally clothed with oak, or beech trees, feathering to the very bottom, where a strip of green, rich, grassy land full of springs, scarcely broader than, and very much resembling, the moat of an old castle, is all that divides the one wooded eminence from the other; and it is into these secluded gardens, these smiling happy valleys, that the inhabitants of Nassau have humbly crept for shelter. These valleys are often scarcely broad enough to contain the single street which forms the village, and from such little abodes, looking upwards, one would fancy that one were living in a mountainous country; but, climb the hill—break the little petty barrier that imprisons you, and from the height, gently undulating before you, is the vast, magnificent country I have described. In short, in the two prospects, one reads the old story—one sees the common picture of human life. Beneath lies the little contracted nook in which we were born, studded with trifling objects, each of which we once fancied to be highly important; every little rock has its name, and every inch of ground belongs to one man, and therefore does not belong to another; but, lying prostrate before us, is a great picture of the world, and until he has seen it, no one born and bred below could fancy how vast are its dimensions, or how truly insignificant are the billows of that puddle in a storm from which he has somehow or other managed to escape. But, without metaphor, nothing can be more striking than the contrast which exists between the little valleys of this duchy, and the great country which soars above them!

With respect to the climate of Nassau, without presuming to dictate upon that subject, I will, while my postilion is jolting me along, request the reader to decipher for himself hieroglyphics which I think sufficiently explain it. In short, I beg leave to offer him the milk of information—warm as I suck it from the cow.

At this moment, everything, see! is smiling; the trees are in full leaf; the crops in full bearing. In no part of Devonshire or Herefordshire have I ever seen such rich crops of apples, the trees being here surrounded with a scaffolding of poles, which after all seem scarcely sufficient to save the boughs from breaking under